Both our fully Gold OA and our hybrid journals allow authors to publish articles under Creative Commons (CC) licences, thereby enabling readers to freely access and re-distribute their articles. We encourage the use of CC-BY licences for Gold OA journal articles, but authors are able to choose more restrictive CC licences if they wish to prevent commercial use or adaptation in new works.

Article processing charges

The costs of publishing Gold OA are typically, but not always, paid through an article processing charge (APC) that is met by the author or the author’s funding body or institution. Only authors of accepted articles are charged APCs and the payment process begins after an article has been accepted.

Our APCs are sensitive to the needs and requirements of different subject fields. Our standard APC for hybrid journals is GBP £1,780/US $2,835 (plus VAT or local sales tax where applicable). Some of our journals charge lower APCs – or do not charge APCs at all – often as part of a specific arrangement with a publishing partner.

Our APC is calculated to contribute to the costs associated with the publication process from peer review of the submitted manuscript, through to copy-editing and typesetting, to online hosting and dissemination of the published article. The costs associated with producing print issues are not included.

In our fully Gold OA journals we provide waivers and discounts to authors from low- and middle-income countries, based on the World Bank list. Authors from these countries will have APC costs waived or reduced during the registration and payment process, which is handled by Copyright Clearance Centre (Rightslink) on our behalf. Waivers and discounts do not apply in our hybrid journals, as any author unable to pay the APC can publish a subscription article in the usual way and make it available as Green OA.

We refund APC payments if we do not meet our promises to you. See below for more information about this.

We believe that journals must publish articles based on the quality of the work rather than the authors’ ability to pay. The editorial process – including the decision whether or not to publish the work – is independent of the author’s decision to publish Gold OA (in hybrid journals) and the author’s ability to pay the APC (in fully Gold OA journals).

It is possible to pay an APC to make an existing article available on a Gold OA basis. Contact the journal concerned to set this process in motion.

Once an article has been accepted for publication in a hybrid journal, the author is given the option to make the article Gold OA. At this point the author should check with their research funder, library, or other funding body, to ensure that funds are available.

The author then completes the relevant licence to publish or copyright forms and the author should only tick the Gold OA box if they have funds to pay the APC. The author can request an invoice to be sent to their funders, or can pay by credit card.

The invoice is raised and sent to the author by RightsLink, the agency that handles our APC payments. The author can request an invoice to be sent to their funder, or can pay by credit card.

The article is published once payment has been initiated in RightsLink.

Once a journal article has been published as Open Access, we are unable to convert the article from OA to a non-OA article.

We will, however, refund APCs in whole or in part if:

The amount charged for the APC is more than advertised on the journal homepage.

Waivers or discounts have not been applied where eligible and appropriately requested.

We will also refund APCs if after 30 days notice from a corresponding author we have not rectified any of the following:

The Creative Commons license applied to your article is not the license you chose. It is your responsibility to ensure that the license you choose is line with your funder's requirements.

The full text of the article as published has not been deposited in PubMed Central (PMC), if it should and can be deposited, in line with Funder’s requirements and provided that the authors indicated funding from PMC and Europe PMC participating funders (see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... and https://europepmc.org/Funders/). Please note that PubMed Central does not currently allow us to deposit the full text of FirstView articles which are published online but which have not yet been placed in a journal issue.